Marriage Must Wait, Study Finds

September 16, 1985|By United Press International.

WASHINGTON — Women are waiting longer than ever to get married and the number of couples living together has tripled since 1970, the Census Bureau said Sunday in a new report on marital and living arrangements.

The study, an updated and refined version of one originally published in August, 1984, also said the proportion of men and women in their late 20s and early 30s who have never married approximately doubled since 1970; the divorce ratio, the ratio of divorced people to married people, has tripled since 1960; and the number of children living with one parent has increased by nearly 6 million since 1970.

In 1984, the bureau said, the median age for a woman to get married was 23, the highest level since 1890 when such statistics were first available. For men, the median age is 25.4, ``nearing the high estimated for the turn of the century,`` the bureau said.

The median marriage age for women began a long-term decline in 1890, according to the bureau, reaching a low of 20.1 years in 1956. In the early 1960s, the median age began to increase slowly and in the eight years following 1976 jumped by 1.7 years for women.

``The trend toward the postponement of marriage also is apparent in the sizable increases that have occurred in the proportion of men and women under 35 years old who have never married,`` the bureau said.

It said the proportion of people never married in the 25 to 34 age groups has approximately doubled since 1970 and the increase in the proportion of men and women in their early 20s who have never married rose by about 20 percentage points, from 36 to 57 percent for women and from 55 to 75 percent for men.

At the same time, the bureau said the number of unmarried couples living together has been growing by an average of 107,000 per year since 1970. In March, 1984, the number of unmarried-couple households reached 1,988,000.

About 70 percent of those households had no children. The bureau noted that it asked no questions about the nature of the relationship, so ``the situations may range from cohabitation prior to or instead of marriage to situations without cohabitation,`` such as an elderly woman or man who rents a room in their home to a college student.

The bureau also said the average age of unmarried couples has dropped since 1970 and that in three out of five unmarried couples in 1984, both partners were less than 35 years old.

In 1984, the divorce ratio was 121 per 1,000 marriages, more than twice the figure of 47 for 1970. During the 1970s, the average annual increase in the ratio rose rapidly, the bureau said, but it said that since 1980 the average annual increase has remained constant with an increase of 5.3 percent per year.

It also found that the annual increase in the divorce ratio differs by race, with blacks having the highest ratio, 240 per 1,000 marriages in 1984.

The report said that in 1984 there were 7 million fewer children under age 18 than in 1970, due to a decline in births that began in the early 1960s and continued in the 1970s.

``However, during the same period the number who lived with only one parent actually rose by 6 million and the number who lived with two parents dropped by 12 million,`` the report said.

In 1984, 75 percent of all children under 18 lived with two parents, 23 percent lived with one parent and 2 percent lived with neither parent.